Historical Sew Monthly May: Holes or in my case fixing them

I know this entry is woefully late, but I did in fact finally finish it!   I am however too late I feel to post on the facebook page, so I am only posting it here!

When the May challenge came up, Holes, I immediately thought of Landsknecht fashion of the late 15th and early 16th century. This time period and fashion style is one of my all time favorites and I immediately wanted to make something completely new.  Then I remembered the dress sitting in the naughty pile.  I dont know if other costumers have a naughty pile, but this is where sewing projects or outfits go that did not go as planned and now require some work I really dont want to do. Examples of this are usually that the sleeves are wonky and I really dont want to redo them.






In the case of this dress, I put the whole dress together out of linen (black) and wool (blue).  The blue wool is woven, so I washed it with hot water and dried it in the dryer on hot.  This shrunk the wool, but also thickened it and strengthened it so it can handle the open cutwork.  The fabric looked good, so I designed the cutwork and carefully cut out the design in the blue wool.  I then hand stitched the white bands (left over linen from a previous project) to the bodice and pieced the white and black bands for the skirt. I then handstitched the blue bands over the white bands. 

Since I have made several of these dresses, the pattern was already worked out, the banding went very quickly.  I decided to see if lacing was a functional option for the the fronts of these gowns, so I stitched eyes (the eye part of hook and eye sets) to the inside of the bodice opening.  The eyes were off set to allow spiral lacing and also went into the dress very quickly.  All in all, this dress took about a week of working in the evenings so I was very chuffed with myself!  I then wore the dress to the Maryland Rennaisance Faire.  When I returned, I noticed I had ripped some of the blue wool and thought "Wow, I must have really caught the skirt on something sharp!"  I repaired the rip and ignored the whole incident. Fast forward about 6 months (and a cross country move) and I wore the dress again to a local SCA event.

This time I felt the skirt catch and rip!  When I got home, I found multiple rips in the blue wool that occurred at a specific place in my design.  I realized that my choice of cutwork design plus the wool being thinner than the wool I usually use meant that there was a systematic weakness in my design.  Really, there should never be too open shapes that close together with the grain straight between them as you can see in the ripped image to the left.  I realized I would either need to replace the lower cutwork band with a totally different fabric (this is totally a correct for the style solution), deal with repairing the rips every time I wore the dress or hand stitching down around the cut outs to stabilize them.  I did not want to do any of these things and I was frustrated with myself for not seeing the design flaw that I threw the whole dress into the naughty pile!


The dress stayed in the naughty pile until this challenge.  You see, I love the color combination and I love the way this dress looks and moves when I am wearing it so I decided that fixing this dress should be my goal for the May challenge.  I decided I loved the color combination and the lower cutwork band so replacing it was not a good option.  I also decided repairing the rips as they happened was not a good option either, so I decided to hand stitch around each cutwork motif by hand.  First I repaired the rips and then each motif took me 40 minutes to stitch. There were 16 motifs, so the total time was about 11 hours of hand sewing.   Here are images of the newly handstitched motifs. There are 2 different motifs that alternate on the lower band.

While this took a really long time, I am so happy to be able to wear this dress again!  I am even thinking of making a special chemise with blackwork or smocking details on the sleeves to showcase the dress!  Here are some detail pictures of the final dress.

The Challenge: Holes!
Material: linen (black and white), woven wool (blue)
Pattern:self drafted from woodcut images
Year:1510-1530
Notions: metal eyes, thread (poly), cotton cording
How historically accurate is it? Maybe 70%, the pattern is accurate and the cutwork is based on woodcuts.  However the dress would have most likely been all wool, the thread would have been linen, the eyelets hand made and the cording silk, linen or wool so there were compromises on the materials.  Also, while sleeveless is document-able, it is rare and I dont have an image with both cutwork and sleeveless on the same dress. Finally, of the outfits for Landsknecht we have color descriptions of, this would be very tame and may not have been the best choice on my part.
Hours to complete: Initial construction was ~20 hours and this current batch was 11 to fix the holes
First worn: In the current incarnation, not yet
Total cost: none, all this was stash

An Outfit for a New Pelican: kirtle and ropa

I have been working on a secret project, and I have wanted to share it with you all, but I wanted to wait until the event had taken place before posting anything online.
A friend of mine in the SCA was offered admittance to the Order of the Pelican (this is a Peerage within the Society for service).  She asked if I would be willing to make her a kirtle and ropa for her elevation ceremony.  I was thrilled to be asked! I am so proud of her for all her hard work and all that she has done to help everyone in our local group.  She provided me with almost all the fabric and trim and told me what she wanted.
For the kirtle, she wanted it done in her personal colors: blue, silver and black.  The kirtle is made of white linen, banded with silver/grey brocade and trimmed with blue and black trim and silver trim.

For the Ropa, my friend provided me with a patch of the 'pelican in her piety' she wanted used on the back of the ropa, but she allowed me to embellish it as I liked. I decided that the Pelican should pop out a bit more and that the edge of the patch should blend with the actual dress. To do this, I stitched 5 rows of gold metal thread around the patch and then added pearls and beads for detail.

Once the back piece was complete, I worked on completing the full ropa.  My friend provided a gold brocade table cloth, burgundy velvet, and two types of gold upholstery trim.  I think I used about 20 yards of trim on the Ropa by itself!  A word of caution to the users of upholstery trim, while most is fine, the wide trim with the very nice interlacing on the top is evil (at least this lot was)!  The interlacing is made by covering ocean weight fishing line with thread.  This fishing line bent a part of my Serger and would explode needles anytime I hit the fishing line.  I broke ~10 needles doing this Ropa and resorted to wearing safety glasses when sewing as I was scared I would get a needle fragment to the eye! Anyway, on to pictures!.

 I am happy to say that my friend liked her outfit and I am honored she let me make this for her!

Here are a few pictures from the event, these pictures are not mine, but were shared on the SCA facebook page.  If these are your pictures and you would like them removed, please let me know and I will remove them!  Oh and the chick in the pink and purple dress is me, I got to wear my new apron!

HSM March 2016: Protection

The HSM challenge for this month was protection, either something to protect yourself or your clothes.  I thought this would be a great opportunity to make an apron to wear with my 16th Century Kampfrau outfits.

My inspiration for the apron is the Seamstress by Edward Schoen, dated 1535.  Her apron looks smocked so I decided to smock my apron as well.  Smocking on aprons does not seem to have been very common.  Looking at historical images, there are many plain white aprons, some colored aprons and a bunch that are embroidered, but only a few that are smocked. For historical references I recommend http://www.larsdatter.com/aprons.htm
This is a wonderful source for all kinds of clothing and accessories.

First, I hemmed the 3 edges that would not be smocked.  Then I did the smocking.

I have previously smocked things, but I have never done honeycomb smocking.  A look at my inspiration image suggested this is honeycomb smocking, so I decided to try it.  This is a really easy method of smocking, you basically mark your points (mine is a 1cm grid) and then stitch 2 dots together, alternating by rows to create the pattern.  For example, on the top row, I connected dots 1&2, 3&4 ect.  On the second row I connected dots 2&3 and 4&5 ext.  You stitch 2 rows at a time, so I did row 1 dots 1&2 then dove down to row 2 dots 2&3, then back up to row 1 dots 3&4 and so on.  I did not use a tutorial, but there are many available online if this description is confusing.

EDIT:  I could not remember where I read that 1cm marks made great smocking for garb, but I have now found it.  Many very cool tutorials and information are available on this page Katafalk, and the discussion on smocking is under her Hemd tutorial. 

Here is a close up of the smocking.

Once the smocking was done, I hand stitched the top of the apron to the fabric that would form the tie.  I then folded the tie fabric in half and stitched the tie together, hiding the raw edges as I went.  In the photo below you can see the tie at the top of the smocking.

Finally, here is a picture of the full apron!  I think it will be a great addition to my kit and provide me a nice apron for keeping my dresses clean.

The Challenge:Protection
Material:Linen
Pattern: None, this is really just 2 scraps of linen.  The body of the apron is a rectangle twice as wide as I wanted the final apron to be and as long as was available.  The smocking decreases the width by about half.  The ties are a long strip of linen folded in half with the edges tucked while sewing.
Year: 1535
Notions: yellow silk thread for smocking and white poly-cotton thread for the rest of the sewing.
How historically accurate is it? 80% or so.  While this apron is based off of a woodcut of the time period, I do not know what it would have been made out of, linen is an educated guess.  I am also unsure what the smocking would have been stitched with, silk is known in the period but may not have been available to a woman of this class.  Also, the color yellow was chosen because I had yellow silk laying around, I have no evidence that yellow would have been used for this application.  Finally, the white thread used for the construction was poly-cotton because I had it on hand, obviously this is not an historically accurate thread for the 16th century.
Hours to complete: Around 10, this was my first time doing this type of smocking and I was a bit slow at it.
First worn: not yet, hopefully I will wear it April 9th
Total cost: None, every thing was out of my stash of scraps.